I'm sitting here in a Portland vegan bar having just finished a bowl of tofu and broccoli with peanut sauce, which seems like as good a place as any to pen my treatise on money. Now, I am not likely to become a marxist (although I did go on a date with a polyamorous communist while here). But money is an interesting aspect that keeps winding its way through my life lately. Take my bowl of broccoli and tofu. When you add on my diet coke and the tip I left (20%), it cost me $14. Now, if I was working at my computer programming job, that would probably take me about 20-25 minutes to earn (after taxes). But if I become a fitness instructor, I'm guessing that will cost me more like an hour.
Today a friend of mine contacted me about an app idea she has. She doesn't know how to start. I do. I can help her. But if I charge my "market rate", there's no way she could afford my services. I won't do that, of course. I'll charge what I think is fair, and what she can pay, if we get to that point.
A few weeks ago I wrote a check for my rent for my last month. It was $1600. To live in Portland. For a month. When people put stickers on their cars that say "Californians go home", this is what they mean. As a programmer, I could afford that.
Last week I met a bartender at one of my favorite spots who I was telling about my plan to get out of the rat race. He heartily approved; he was opening his own recording studio, and working as a waiter just to make ends meet and fill in the gaps.
Money is not necessarily the problem. To mangle a saying and paraphrase somebody famous (I forget who), money is the worst possible solution to the problem that money solves, except for all the other solutions. Nobody has yet come up with a better way to figure this out. We need people to do things for us. No man is an island, etc., etc. But if we do things for other people for free, than we don't have any way to indicate that value to anybody other than the person we did that thing for. Barter sounds nice, but if I'm a programmer, well, not everybody needs things programmed. In fact, most people really don't. So...that won't work. Thus: money.
But the thing is, like most solutions, money then looks around for nails for its proverbial hammer. We try to solve other problems with money. Like being happy, or well adjusted. Instead of just a stand in for societal work value, it becomes a proxy for education, or good looks, or suitability as a mate, or success, or whatever. In fact it's none of those things. It's a very narrow solution to a very narrow problem; how to remember that something of value happened so that we can time-shift or location-shift it somewhere/sometime else. That's it. Money has no value over and above our need to have somebody do something for us or to acquire something we need. Money that sits in a bank someplace is literally of no value unless and until we spend it on something we actually need. Putting money in a bank and then not using it is a little like making a to-do list but then not doing any of the things. The list is of no value. It's what we cross off the list that counts.
It's taken me 39 years to understand this. In some ways I feel like life is beginning over again solely based on that understanding.